Option to show a different delimiter in the finder than the one used

[tobx]

• [X] I have read through the manual page (man fzf)
• [X] I have the latest version of fzf
• [X] I have searched through the existing issues

Info

• OS
  • [ ] Linux
  • [X] Mac OS X
  • [ ] Windows
  • [ ] Etc.
• Shell
  • [ ] bash
  • [X] zsh
  • [ ] fish

Problem / Steps to reproduce

I would love to have an option to show a different delimiter in the finder than the one used in the background. This would also solve #2154.

Example:

echo '1:2:;3' | fzf --delimiter '[:;]+' --with-nth '1,3,2'

This displays 1:32:; in the finder.

Introducing a new option like --display-delimiter could solve that problem:

printf '1:2:;3' | fzf --delimiter '[:;]+' --display-delimiter ' : ' --with-nth '1,3,2'

This could easily display 1 : 3 : 2, because https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/issues/2154#issuecomment-682589184 would not be a problem in this case.

This would also enable users to use a "safe" delimiter like NUL and display a human readable delimiter in the finder.

[junegunn]

I would recommend using an external tool to pre-process the input.

printf '1:2:;3' |
  awk -F'[:;]+' 'BEGIN {OFS=" : "} {print $0 "\t" $1, $3, $2}' |
  fzf --delimiter "\t" --with-nth 2.. |
  awk -F"\t" '{print $1}'

• Use awk to reorder of the fields and use a different output separator
• Prepend the original line before a tab character, so that we can restore it after filtering
• Use --with-nth to hide the original line and display only the formatted text (2..)
• Use awk to get the original line

This approach is much more flexible than the suggested option. You can use any tool you want to format the text any way you want.

[tobx]

@junegunn This does not work if you also want to use --nth. And with --display-delimiter it would be possible to make fzf not match the delimiter itself in a search.